


jude law and a semester abroad.

by sp201120122013



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-02
Updated: 2012-04-02
Packaged: 2017-11-02 22:14:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/373926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sp201120122013/pseuds/sp201120122013
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>gerard is away in france for school. frank remains in jersey, all alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	jude law and a semester abroad.

You said it'd only be a few months.

Yeah, it's only a few months. It's only a few months of me sitting alone, bitter, trapped by a low GPA and a shitty convenience store job, sitting alone on the night shift so that I'll be awake and available to get all of your text messages. All of the text messages that I bumped my plan up to receive, the dollars and pennies I'm shelling out over you so that I can get whatever little paper airplanes of conversation that you choose to throw across the Atlantic ocean and into my grubby hands. 

I've got all the germs and dirt under my nails that just doesn't compare to all of the lead, graphite, pastels, paint, whatever the hell you make your shit with. The clay, the turpentine, everything I used to smell on you when you drove me home. Everything that my room used to stink of when you left the next morning. And it was just oh, oh baby, oh we'll be fine. We're fine.

We're fine when you're chewing on all your bagels or baguettes or whatever the hell you eat over on that island, over across the channel and in that magical city that's so high up its own ass it swallows its own shit twice a day. Your shit is still sliding down my throat, every time you held me into the mornings before I had to leave for my shift--yeah, early in the day. Things were different then. Things were different when I constantly had to reach into my pocket and slam my shitty phone shut, just to keep the buzzing down from all your pixelated love notes. You don't have as much time for that anymore. I guess you could be busy with whatever masterpiece you're working on. You're so goddamn talented, and me, well, I'm just ringing up the same old potato chips and cigarettes. Gatorade and Hostess cakes, the rainbows of carbonation in the soda fountain spilling onto the floor. The only thing I'm making is a bigger mess, a wider puddle on the floor. You're, who even fucking knows what you're making. All I know is I'm too fucking dumb to get it anyway.

You probably found someone who does get it. Someone who drinks all that shitty coffee with you in those fancy cafes or whatever late at night, some asshole in a beret who's actually taller than you, someone who can take care of you and hold you to a morning that's just my goddamn afternoon. We're so split apart that we're never even awake together. It doesn't even make a difference that we've still got phone numbers, static-ridden calls and text messages that get delivered after the fact, hours and hours after the fact. Most of the time I just console myself that half of your messages, no, no ninety percent of them, they just fall off the telephone wires and into the ocean in the process of trying to make it over here to Jersey. It's the best way to explain how infrequent they are.

It's two in the morning here, and I don't really know how the time differences work. You call me at odd hours sometimes, and I'll wake up to a hasty voicemail. A "things are going great," a spillage of words about your new friends with the bonus of their voices in the background. You always complained about how no one here understood you, about how I was the only one who ever got it. I guess you've met plenty of people who get you now. And in those voicemails, sometimes you forget an "I love you" at the end. It should be second nature to you. It's second nature to me. It's been first nature, the first thing in my sloppy fucking head since I first met you. I can roll your name off my tongue, roll my tongue into your mouth better than I can fold dollar bills into this shitty register. You were the only thing I was ever good at.

Maybe that's why you left. Maybe you knew that France wouldn't even make a difference in your art, but you just wanted to get over there as soon as you could so that you could make the distance a little more natural, make dumping me a little easier whenever you decide to come home. I'll be home in about six hours, busting out of here at eight in the morning after the coffee rush. Once the businessmen rush out and the soccer moms come in, people who both sneer at me exactly the same. They don't have those wet eyes you do, the ones that don't see anything but me. I wish I had the sense to blow my money on something other than pot and metal to shove in my face. Maybe if I learned how to save up, if I made a nest egg you'd be a little more inclined to stick around. If I made an investment. If I could make you some goddamn engagement ring out of something other than a bent paper clip.

Like that would happen. I'm a loser high school student who grew and blossomed into a loser on minimum wage, and you held my hand the whole way. I stopped crying into your shoulder over my crappy report card and started crying over mean customers. About the bums who stumbled in drunk, who offered to pay me for sex. Who yelled and clawed at my face when I had to phone the police. But you just kissed up all my tears and went on to fucking draw something all inspired by it. You don't know what it's like to be fucking scared. You just know how to twist all of the nails that bend and bust in my guts and straighten them out into regular pins and needles, leading me by a paint stained leash to all your congested galleries, to cling close to you while everyone who sees me for what I really am stares at me and wishes I would leave.

I should've left before you had the opportunity to do it yourself. I should've just picked up a train to a distant relative. But I'd still be in the country. I'm not good enough for Europe, I'm not even good enough for here. And that's saying something. That's really fucking saying something. Someone comes in and I ring up their booze. I wish I was lucky enough to stumble around this city plastered. I'm too much of a baby to even buy it myself. I have to borrow the concept of friends, go through all the party motions and slide dollar bills around because no one really likes me enough to let me drink for free. They didn't like me much before and they don't like me much now. I only crawled back to them because you're too busy drinking all the gourmet grapes your new friends get you to run around town with me anymore, swiping your debit card for cheap beer. It always tasted like shit, and it was always worse the next morning when we woke up with fermentation in our mouths and dead wheat mashing together as our sweaty tongues slid around just like the blades in the plow yanking that original, perfect grain down. 

I want my shift to end so I can go home and smoke out all my feelings. I just want to light everything that's bothering me up into ash, for another night without you. I've got a calendar up counting the number of days until you come home. Until I get to see you again. I'll sneak some booze, too, from the pitiful stash I've been building up for myself. It'll be better than nothing, even if it's warm, flat and stale. The worse it tastes the better. The more it'll remind me of those crappy nights I spent with you, staying up until we passed out and the alarm clocks ripped us back into the real world two hours later, feeling the crummiest we've ever felt in our lives. And the happiest. Or at least it was the happiest for me. I thought the smile smeared across your face was as real as the leftover charcoal, and now I can only hope I was right.

Maybe an hour later, I feel a buzz go off in my jeans, and it's just my luck that the convenience store is one hundred per cent deserted at this point. My face lights up, embarrassing and involuntary, and I scrabble inside my pants to pull it out, almost dropping it on the floor in the process. The small message icon on the front side of it is open, and I flip it open, the "one new message" making me even more excited. I click it and it loads, and it's an area code 888 that's telling me about a way to settle all my credit card debt. I almost drop my phone again. This was nothing, part two of one million. I haven't heard from you in days. I open up your name in my inbox, with 36 messages between now and two weeks ago. We used to go through 36 in an hour. I bite my lip, snap my phone shut and shove it back into my pocket.

I spend the rest of the night waiting for my phone to light up, maybe just once, and maybe it'll actually be you this time. It doesn't.

It's daytime in France. You don't have an excuse.


End file.
